Kevin Standlee: Fandom Is My Way of Life

Yesterday I worked my way through a pile of mail that I thought was all bulk/advertising. Imagine how I felt when the letter from the Lyon County Treasurer's office with the property tax bill fell out. That's the property tax for both Fernley House and the East Lot.

Lyon County property taxes are due in four installments. I would have missed the first installment anyway because the bill probably arrived in early August and I was still in the UK when the payment came due. That's a 4% penalty for late payment. But wait: the second payment was due more than ten days ago, and that means a 5% penalty over all four payments. (Not cumulative; just 5% total for all of the payments.)

I paid the four payments, plus the 5% penalty. I also scheduled the remaining payments (with no further penalties) in my online banking. Those payments aren't due until the first week of January and the first week of March. At least there is no further penalty other than the 5% penalty on the first four payments.

The property taxes may be the only bills I get only on paper. (That includes the tax on a piece of property in Yuba County, California in which I inherited a half-interest from my mother, but I got that one after I got home and paid my half of it with no issue.) I don't know any way to have them delivered electronically. Had they been e-billed to me, I would have scheduled all eight payments.

I do not resent paying property taxes. They are necessary for funding services, and the rates here are not high (of course, the level of services are also not high). I just wish there was an e-bill option. Other local services like the city water/sewer bill can manage it; I wonder why the county can't.

Today I bit the bullet and did our income taxes. I have TurboTax, but it still took about five hours or so of fiddling with various pieces of paperwork, especially inasmuch as the most complicated one was from a brokerage that claimed I could import the (long and detailed) information directly into TurboTax but could not. After several tries, I gave up and just entered the summary information, which means that I also have to mail a copy of the details on paper to the IRS after they accept the return.

While I have a rather large amount of expenses that could nominally be considered charitable deductions, including expenses related to chairing Westercon 74 but that were not reimbursable by the convention, they weren't enough to justify itemizing deductions. The standard deduction has always been best for me except one time many years ago, and even then I ended up being reimbursed for part of what I'd deducted, and so I had to learn about how to fix that. (By reporting it as miscellaneous income the following year, that being easier than filing an amended return, and either method is allowed.)

In the end, the paper loss I took when I sold my grandparents' property for less than its appraised value offset most of the gains realized when we liquidated some investments to pay part of the cost of buying the East Lot, so it worked out in the end. (For any tax geeks who know I sold that property a couple of years ago: capital loss carryover was my friend.) I ended up owing $325, but that's not enough to trigger a penalty, and the payment isn't due until April 18 and I could schedule the payment like any of the other bills I pay online. It could have been worse.

I keep track of my expenses pretty closely using Quicken, and trips like the Loscon-SMOFCon-Tonopah trip are things that I flag as potentially charitable tax deductions on account of nearly all of it (except the time in Cottonwood AZ for the train trip) was for the purpose of promoting Westercon 74, a part of SFSFC, which is a tax-exempt charitable organization.

( Why Travel Expenses Are Counted as Cash Donations )

While business travel allows 58 cents per mile of travel and is generally adjusted upwards with inflation, the charitable mileage rate has been stuck at 14 cents per mile because it's fixed by legislation and hasn't been increased in years. It's clearly too low. Alternatively, you can deduct your actual direct expenses incurred, which is mostly fuel. (Parking charges are something you can take whether you use the mileage rate or the direct-expenses cost.)

For the November-December trip, I kept careful track of both our mileage (treating the incidental mileage from Cottonwood to Sedona separately) and how much we spent on fuel. At the end of the trip, it worked out that the mileage rate and the amount spend directly on fuel were almost exactly the same (within $20 of each other). This as much as anything shows why the 14 cents/mile legislatively-mandated charitable mileage deduction is hopelessly out of date, as it makes no allowance for wera and tear on one's vehicle.

Whether I'll actually end up with enough direct travel expenses to justify itemizing deductions on my income tax remains to be seen. In all of the years I've kept such track, there's only been one year when it was justified (2002), and inasmuch as I was reimbursed in 2003 for some of the expenses I'd incurred and deducted in 2002, I also had to learn how to report that on my taxes. (I reported the following-year reimbursement as miscellaneous taxable income and paid taxes on it.)

This, incidentally, is why I know how much money my involvement in fandom has cost me over the years. Despite what some nitwits seem to think, I don't do the volunteer work for the tax perks (even the year I took the deduction, the monetary benefit was only a few hundred dollars), but inasmuch as they are there, I always calculate them, just in case. Would I still do as much volunteer work without the potential tax deduction? Almost certainly. I have a really bad lifetime case of Volunteerism.

I spent a good chunk of today's Super Bowl coverage doing my income taxes. Rather to my surprise, despite all of the changes, the amount I paid (and my refund) didn't change appreciably. I think dealing with TurboTax with the Big Game on the other screen was a reasonably good use of my time.

Incidentally, despite having mortgage interest deductions and keeping track of my expenses as a volunteer for a 501(c)(3) tax-exempt charitable organization (SFSFC, Worldcon 76) carefully, it still wasn't worth the effort to itemize deductions. I even kept track of all of the money I spent on sales taxes in 2018 (Between $900 and $1000) in case it mattered; as Nevada has no personal income tax, I didn't have to make a choice between the two under the new tax law.. Still, now I know how much I'm contributing in consumption tax.

I got my taxes done this weekend. Thanks to decisions made by my management (that took months to get Human Resources to actually implement), this is the first tax return in my employed career where I have not had to file a California income tax return.

We went to Reno to do large-scale grocery shopping this evening. For some reason, Winco was a madhouse. Even with nearly every checkstand open, the queues were huge. They were nearly out of grocery carts. One of the staff said they couldn't see any particular reason for it. They're normally hugely busy on the 1st and 15th of the month, but there's no reason for this jam. Lisa and I balked, went to Raley's, got some of the things we needed for now, and resolved to go back on a mid-week evening that isn't the 1st/15th. But not tomorrow, because there is another snowstorm coming tonight. The Nevada Department of Transportation signs on the highway are warning people to plan ahead for Monday's commute. After the multiple huge accidents on I-80 and US-395 last week, I'm not surprised. We'll stay off the roads, I think.

Oh, look, a non-Hugo/WSFS/Worldcon-related post.

( Rolling Stone, One Year On )

We are now free of the potential sales tax issue with the RV, and it's one less thing I have to track. I must, however, still keep track of how many days I am in California for any reason, business or personal, because I still earn income in California and am thus subject to California non-resident income tax. (Nevada has no personal income tax.) Indeed, because of differences between how California and the federal government tax healthcare savings accounts, I ended up owing $600 in California tax beyond my withholding. I mailed my return to Sacramento on Monday.

I've been asked why I'm doing this hotel-stay thing instead of renting a "cheap apartment." Well, to start with, "cheap apartment" and "Bay Area" are pretty much mutually exclusive terms. (Go search Craigslist if you are not familiar with Bay Area housing costs.) Second, I'm now only in the Bay Area about two weeks (between ten and twelve nights) per month, not including special events like BayCon. My previous apartment cost me about $33/day. If I can continue to get the $41 (net after taxes) room rate I'm currently getting, as long as I spend no more than 24 nights per month in the Bay Area, I'm money ahead. Finally, by no longer spending the majority of my time in California, I've established residency in Nevada, and if I'm reading the rules correctly, I now only have to pay income tax for the days I'm actually working in California. For now, I'm continuing to have full resident income taxes withheld because I was legally resident in the state until the end of April of this year and need to have an actual 540NR California non-resident/part-year-resident tax return behind me to figure out the real impact of this, but it seems like it should cut my California income tax in half in the long run.

( You Get What You Pay For )

I got a note from my company's HR department advising us of changes in tax withholding on account of the stimulus package from the federal government. Following their instructions and going to the web site they directed, I determined that if I did not do something, I'd end up owing between $500 and $1000 in income taxes next April. Besides not wanting to have to come up with the money then, I thought there was a penalty for under-payment. So I had to refile my W-4 withholding exemptions form, and after all the changes percolated through, I end up with about $2/week more in take-home pay. Oh, well, at least my net pay didn't go down.

The long-delayed SFSFC minutes are complete, and I've uploaded the July minutes (which were actually approved last November, but I forgot to post them) to the SFSFC web site.

I discovered that my web-site maintenance software, Dreamweaver, doesn't get along with Skype. If Skype is running, Dreamweaver won't connect to SFSFC's web host. I already knew that I couldn't do web updates when VPN was running on account of my company firewall won't let it through, but this was a new incompatibility to me.

And I found time to take around Quarry Lakes after lunch. (Lunch being around 4 PM on account of not having got up until nearly 11.)

Now to finish doing my taxes. Unfortunately, I have to wait until Lisa and I are in the same place again to finalize them, or else pay the stupid fees for e-filing. In past years, Intuit had a rebate for the first return e-filed, but I don't see it this year. I don't see why I should pay a fee to e-file when the IRS surely would prefer everyone e-file to save them having to deal with the data entry. It's just like online banking used to have hefty service charges, even though setting it up meant big savings for the banks. I assume that someday the fees will come down or go away entirely.

Cheryl passes on to me this article from The Economist about an attack on the tax deduction for charitable giving. ( Tax neepery about fannish non-profits follows )

As you might expect, I would be strongly opposed to removing the charitable tax deduction or to significantly narrowing the definition of what a "charity" is. I like the American system, and I think that saying "only donations to the poor are worthy," is a step down a slippery slope that leads to removing the deduction entirely and saying, "Only the government can choose what is really worth of public support." While the tax deduction (which I have sometimes taken) isn't my primary motivation for my volunteer work with fandom, I believe that removing the deduction would have a chilling impact on charitable giving of all sorts.